Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Red ice over Chichen Itza

        Richard Hoagland's storytelling technique is really hopeless. He adds way too much detail, gets side-tracked, then repeats himself, loses track of time and sometimes doesn't even get to the point before he's cut off by the commercial breaks. On Red Ice Radio three days ago, he took an entire hour to retell the story of his unfortunate experience at Chichen Itza last December 19th (see a previous post for the deets.) He spent about ten minutes digressing into a discussion of what legally constitutes an arrest. *Eyeroll*

        Of course, if there's one thing worse than Hoagland's storytelling, it's Hoagland's science. And nowhere is his science more plainly exposed as pseudo than in his so-called "measurement" of the torsion field with his Accutron/MicroSet™ rig.

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Sidebar for any readers that may be new to this topic: Hoagland says that rotating masses, including celestial objects, generate inertial fields that cause an increase of the inertia of any other mass they intersect. More recently he has extended this belief to the proposition that large pyramids amplify this effect in their immediate vicinity, but he has offered no explanation. He has never said what units a torsion field would be measured in.

He owns a 35-year-old (at least) Bulova Accutron wristwatch. He uses precision timing equipment from Mumford Micro Systems to sense departures of the watch's tuning fork frequency from its nominal 360 Hz, and records a trace of the frequency over time.
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        Hoagland's frequency traces, of course, are not direct measurements of the torsion field, but (hypothetically) indications of a side effect of that field's fluctuations. And it gets worse. Since  his theory is that the torsion field increases inertia, the only reading that would offer any support for his crazy theory would be a definite, repeatable, decrease in tuning fork frequency (which is inversely proportional to the square root of the density of its material.) As this blog has pointed out more than once, to be science as opposed to a meaningless techno-game, his protocol would have to include baseline recordings and controls. We don't know whether Hoagland even records these—if he does, he keeps them to himself.

        So do his Accutron games show repeatable frequency decrease? Far from it. Here's what we know:

Venus transit 2004: 9 upspikes, 0 downspikes
Teotihuacan 2009: 2 upspikes, 0 downspikes
Tikal 2009: 7 upspikes, 9 downspikes
Stonehenge  2011:  no data
Avebury 2011:  no data
Silbury Hill 2011:  no data
Annular eclipse May 2012: 7 upspikes, 1 downspike
Venus transit June 2012: no data
Chichen Itza Dec 2012: no data

AGGREGATE:  25 UP, 10 DOWN

        Hoagland has said over and over again that he has successfully measured the torsion field, when in fact he has done no such thing. For him to say, as he did on Red Ice a few days ago, "The predictions of the model are overwhelmingly confirmed," is a lie.

A barefaced lie, Richard.

7 comments:

Binaryspellbook said...

I listened to this excruciating hour on Red Ice Radio. Hoagland is as ridiculous as ever. He stretches out this hour trying to make it sound dramatic. As if he personally was targeted because the powers that be in Mexico (who's that Richard ? - the drug cartels..) are scared of his attempts to expose a new physics.

The truth is he tried to sneak a laptop past the authorities and got caught. Simple as that.

Hoagland however claimed to have kept his old lappy running during his "arrest and detainment" - and of course he managed to get some "stunning results."

Which isn't surprising. Since Hoagland guarantees stunning results every time. Even before he has attempted an "experiment." This is what he calls science.

Anonymous said...

If inertia changes would have to cause only decreases in Accutron frequency remains the question. For example, in certain positions ("fork" down) the effects of gravity would cause a slightly higher tuning fork frequency. According to the Accutron folks it's about 5s/day.

Hoagland's proposed inertial changes to the fork/circuit might have a similar effect, like in DePalma's spinning ball experiment the balls fall "faster": added downwards energy,

That said, without those "baseline recordings and controls" being published and other repeated experiments in setups isolated from other interference (excited breathing setting off bad electrical contacts for example) or the case of simply malfunctioning equipment, the data is indeed technically worthless for others.

If the "scratched flatbed scanner" theory on the lunar glass could be confirmed, one could easily position a similar scenario here: fantastic meaurements of ones own massive equipment failures?

D.

expat said...

Binary: Very well put, yes.

Anon: You're correct. Per Hoagland's own explanation (notwithstanding his misuse of the term "plane of rotation"), inertia can either increase (if the fork is orthogonal to the axis of rotation) or decrease (if the fork is parallel.) Now, in all his dramatic accounts of his heroic experiments he has not once (to my knowledge) indicated what the orientation of the watch is. If he's been moving it during the experimental period, and not reporting that, it's another reason to reject his results.

Ricky Poole said...

Oh come on guys, his watch has a tuning fork in it. A tuning fork! The instrument is called an Accutron for Pete's sake. Something with a name like that would have to be accurate with several teeny tiny smidgens. I have a swiss army knife with a fork in it around here somewhere. I wonder if I can hook that up to my laptop or an old iPhone and measure the angst of the universe or something? No doubt my findings would be suppressed.

expat said...

"Something with a name like that would have to be accurate...."

Maybe, but remember, the last Accutron was manufactured in 1977. So, y'know....

Anonymous said...

Accutrons were actually widely used in space flight and early satellites in the 60's and 70's. So it's not that crazy to see it as accurate and reasonable useful for certain cases.

But lets also list a selection of the problems with it as seen at the page Accutron Anomalies:


1. Presence of electromagnetic devices (although the schematics at Hoagland's page does suggest shielding and long cable but no picture of actual usage).

2. Copper arthritis bracelets, sports bracelets, balance bracelets (anything with magnets) can interfere with the timekeeping.

3. Resting the watch on a wooden or other hard surface can cause variations in timekeeping accuracy from minutes per day, to hours. The silver oxide batteries used today deliver voltage differently than the original mercury batteries and hard vibrations against solid objects interfere with the normal rhythmic vibration of the tuning fork.

4. So even though the watch may keep perfect time in the shop, and on the timing equipment, after being placed back into service, they may require additional adjustments to the timekeeping accuracy (so we need to know maintenance state overall).

5. There are many things that affect the timekeeping in these watches. Most of them didn't even exist in the 1960s and 1970s when these watches were produced.

D.

Unknown said...

@Binaryspellbook

There's a 13 part talk by Mikey somewhere on youtoob that I watched the first part of. The 10 minute segment consisted of him showing off Hoagie's "Ron Jeremy" NASA id and saying "This was Richard 20 years ago", followed by older pix of him 20 years ago and making jokes the audience lapped up.

At the end of it he hadn't even begun to talk about anything "controversial". Needless to say, I didn't stick around for part 2.

You can also look for the Hoagland "documentary" on the glass worm on Mars (only do this if it's 3am and you're drunk). At one point he shows off a Weekly World News headline about aliens (with the WWN header conveniently cropped) claiming it's proof of humanity's dawning enlightenment or something.